Courtenay Quotes & Sayings

I wish to cup knowledge in my hand and drink it as one drinks water by the side of the stream. — Bryce Courtenay

I watch people get older and lose their intellectual acuity; you lose that sharpness, that cleanness, that brain that you worked so hard on and that you were gifted with and lose the gifts that were given. — Bryce Courtenay

I was in King Lear with Sir Tom Courtenay at The Royal Exchange in Manchester. In fact, that's where I met my husband. I was playing Regan and he was playing Cornwall and together we fell in love plucking out Gloucester's eyes. It was great fun. Everyone assumes that I was Cordelia because I've got blonde hair but I was Regan and they gave me a long auburn wig. It was great, good fun. — Ashley Jensen

Inside all people there is love, also the need to take care of the other man who is his brother. Inside everyone is a savage, but there is also happening tenderness and compassion. — Bryce Courtenay

Advertising was only meant to be a very small part of my life. I had intended that I would work extensively in journalism for about five or six years and then I'd become a writer. — Bryce Courtenay

Sometimes the slightest things change the directions of our lives, the merest breath of a circumstance, a random moment that connects like a meteorite striking the earth. Lives have swiveled and changed direction on the strength of a chance remark. — Bryce Courtenay

Always listen to yourself ... It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. — Bryce Courtenay

The power of one is above all things the power to believe in yourself, ofen well beyond any latent ability you may have previously demonstrated. The mind is the athlete, the body is simply the means it uses to run faster or longer, jump higher, shoot straighter, kick better, swim harder, hit further, or box better. — Bryce Courtenay

Your perfume. . .' His tone held a faint hint of surprise. 'I'd somehow expected you to wear something more. . .sultry. I don't recognize this fragrance.'
'It's new," Courtenay said tersely. 'It's called Get Lost. You've probably never encountered it before. — Grace Green

It is better just to get on with the business of living and minding your own business and maybe, if God likes the way you do things, he may just let you flower for a day or a night. But don't go pestering and begging and telling him all your stupid little sins, that way you will spoil his day. — Bryce Courtenay

It was still quite late when I got married, 30s, I don't know. — Tom Courtenay

Geoff Nelder inhabits Science Fiction the way other people inhabit their clothes. — Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay and Al Pacino made me want to act. I've always been interested in men with a vulnerable side. — Martin Freeman

When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win. — Bryce Courtenay

It's good to be a little frightened. It's good to respect your opponent. It keeps you sharp. In the fight game, the head rules the heart. But in the end the heart is the boss. — Bryce Courtenay

In this world there are very few things made from logic alone. It is illogical for man to be too logical. Some things we must just let stand. The mystery is more important than any possible explanation. — Bryce Courtenay

There were old firemasters and bad firemasters; there were no old bad firemasters — Jon Courtenay Grimwood

I guess my use-by date is just about up but if I could come back as a storyteller now, I would be jumping over the moon because wow, just think what's available. — Bryce Courtenay

Unfortunately, since there was only one of him, most of his riches were wasted. — Jon Courtenay Grimwood

The imagination is always the best torturer. — Bryce Courtenay

Words are like diamonds. Polish them too much, and all you get are pebbles. — Bryce Courtenay

Innocents, the meat in a ghastly sandwich between an uncaring society and a vengeful state. — Bryce Courtenay

Boldness, at first a stranger to be treated with caution, soon becomes a friend, then a partner, and finally taken for granted, as is the daily relationship between married people. — Bryce Courtenay

Intelligence is a harder gift. For this you must work, you must practice it, challenge it, and maybe toward the end of your life you will master it. Cleverness is the shadow, whereas intelligence is the substance.
-Doc — Bryce Courtenay

Humans best survive when they are given a purpose; a common enemy to defeat, revenge to wreak or a dream to cling to. — Bryce Courtenay

Dare your genius to walk the wildest unknown ways. — Bryce Courtenay

Around a proposition or an idea or story willingly. Some — Bryce Courtenay

Storytellers are the keepers - we are the time keepers, the continuity keepers. We are the people who tell us who we are, where we've come from, and maybe even where we're going. — Bryce Courtenay

As a small child I had discovered that only two places are available to those who wish to remain concealed. The choices are to be a nonentity or an exception. You either disappear into a plebeian background or move forward to where most others fear to follow. — Bryce Courtenay

I'm not religious. I love what Clive James said the other day. James is a brilliant writer, but he keeps on writing poems on stuff. And he said, "God doesn't have a leg to stand on." — Tom Courtenay

There just doesn't seem to be a market for something with aspiration anymore. — Tom Courtenay

That opening position in every negotiation. The one that said, out of the goodness of my heart I'm going to agree to rob you blind. — Jon Courtenay Grimwood

I Shall Never Surrender. — Bryce Courtenay

The rich become rich by taking, and the poor by giving. — Bryce Courtenay

I have found in life that everything, no matter how bad, comes to an end. — Bryce Courtenay

My job, and that's my job, is to dress the naked truth. To make it interesting, to make it viable, to make it seem like something you understand and feel and love. — Bryce Courtenay

The mind is the athlete; the body is simply the means it uses to run faster or longer, jump higher, shoot straighter, kick better, swim harder, hit further, or box better. Hoppie's dictum to me, "First with the head and then with the heart," was more than simply mixing brains with guts. It meant thinking well beyond the powers of normal concentration and then daring your courage to follow your thoughts. — Bryce Courtenay

I came in on this movie after there had been a director and I came in after Tom Courtenay had talked to Ron Harwood about making a movie. So, you know Tom and Albert Finney had been friends since the beginning of their career as they became stars around the same time - Tom always reminds me that Albert was first with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and then Tom with The Long Distance Runner. — Dustin Hoffman

I never did anything about my stardom, it never meant anything to me. — Tom Courtenay

But I was still alive, and in my book, where there's life, there's hope. — Bryce Courtenay

What is a german? to say a man is a german, what is that? does it tell you if he is a good man? or a bad man? no, my friend, it tells you nothing about a man to say he is german. a man must think what he is inside. what he is on the outside, how can this matter? — Bryce Courtenay

This is something particular to actors, especially in plays, and in films, too - but in plays, it's like, don't get involved with anyone in the play. — Tom Courtenay

The old actors in the old days, they used to go on tour, to get the play ready for the West End, and to learn their lines. The old timers used to say, "Be very careful, dear boy, what you get in to during the first weeks of a long tour." — Tom Courtenay

I learned that in each of us there burns a flame of independence that must never be allowed to go out. That as long as it exists within us we cannot be destroyed. — Bryce Courtenay

If you don't know where you are going, then how will you get there? VISUALISE! Make pictures in your mind. See the desination. Imagine your arrival. Dream in perfect detail. See yourself the way you want to be when you arrive. See yourself arriving. Make yourself a road map and study it every day until you know the way and the destination by heart. — Bryce Courtenay

Then I felt like having a piss and I did that — Bryce Courtenay

The thing about fires most people don't realise is the noise. It's deafening so even if you shout, you can't be heard three feet away. You can never quite get used to the fury of it, it's like a mighty roar of anger that just keeps going. I suppose flame is beautiful, the way it leaps into the air like it's free to do what it wants. Other elements are also free and I guess the sea can be pretty awesome, wind too, and lightning, but fire has a mind and a determination. You don't see it as a blind raging thing, which I suppose it is, but something that attacks and thinks and changes tactics. It has a malevolence that uses surprise, dirty tricks, cunning. You get to think of it as someone, not something, and it's someone you have to beat, but right from the start you don't like your chances because it's so big and unpredictable and can do so much harm. — Bryce Courtenay

My occupation has been a great deal with David Foster Wallace, and he didn't manage it, and he was very much looking for something that isn't totally selfish, and finding meaning. It's a struggle. — Tom Courtenay

In teaching me independence of thought, they had given me the greatest gift an adult can give to a child besides love, and they had given me that also. — Bryce Courtenay

I tell myself lies and soon I believe them. — Bryce Courtenay

You couldn't lose, you was playing Mozart — Bryce Courtenay

A sentiment, coming from it is not to be trusted. — Bryce Courtenay

People say I don't write books, I make Christmas presents. — Bryce Courtenay

Generosity overpowers greed. — Bryce Courtenay

Always in life an idea starts small, it is only a sapling idea, but the vines will come and they will try to choke your idea so it cannot grow and it will die and you will never know you had a big idea, an idea so big it could have grown thirty meters through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky.' He looked at me and continued. 'The vines are people who are afraid of originality, of new thinking. Most people you encounter will be vines; when you are a young plant they are very dangerous.' His piercing blue eyes looked into mine.' Always listen to yourself, Peekay. It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you grow stronger. If you are right, you have taken another step toward a fulfilling life. — Bryce Courtenay

My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author. — Bryce Courtenay

I had never seen a prison, nor had I even imagined one, but there is a racial memory in man that instinctively knows of these things. The architecture of misery has an unmistakable look and feel about it. — Bryce Courtenay

It's nothing to be ashamed of. There comes a time in everything when you don't know something. — Bryce Courtenay

While I told myself that each win was a small deposit on the ultimate ownership of the world welterweight crown, the enormous need in me to win touched a whole heap of other responses a fourteen years old can't really work out. It had something to do with rejecting the Lord, with my mother, the Judge, being surrounded by guys who came from wealthy homes, even my headless snake. While I didn't think of it as camouflage, I now know that it was, that I kept myself protected by being out in front. Too far in front to be an easy mark. — Bryce Courtenay

Seems to be catching."
"What is?" asked Neku.
"Wanting Kit dead."
Neku shrugged. "He was fucking the wife of a gang boss and bikers used his bar to deal drugs, plus lots of uyoku felt Yoshi Tanaka should be married to someone Japanese. Then there's chippu he owed to the local police and unpaid bills from a Brazilian transvestite who mends his motorcycle. It could have been anyone. — Jon Courtenay Grimwood

The joy of a small town lies in its unchanging nature. — Bryce Courtenay

My emotional investment started when I read the first scene of the actual drama [45 Years]. I can't explain it, there's no logic to it, but the notion of one's youth that somehow comes back but is gone, a man of my age connecting to that timing of life. — Tom Courtenay

Good conversational debate is an end in itself, and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human. — Bryce Courtenay

Winning is a state of mind that embraces everything you do. — Bryce Courtenay

The film business is absurd. Stars don't last very long. It's much more interesting to be a proper actor. — Tom Courtenay

The time we are given for parenting is so short, passes so quickly and is jumbled up with so many other priorities and disruptions that, in the end, we come to doubt that we used it in the best interests of our children. — Bryce Courtenay

It's not what a man does, it's what a man is that counts! — Bryce Courtenay

Small can beat big, but you must have a plan. — Bryce Courtenay

The man assumes the role of the loner, the thinker and the searching spirit who calls the privileged and the powerful to task. The power of one was the courage to remain separate, th think through the truth and not be beguiled by convention or the plausible arguments of those who expect to maintain power, whatever the cost. — Bryce Courtenay

The difficulties besetting the translators of the LXX were very great. It was almost impossible to reproduce the native inimitableness of a Semitic language in an Aryan tongue. They had to adopt new constructions, some lexical and syntactical forms which were foreign to the older Greek. — John Courtenay James

Love is energy: it can neither be created nor destroyed. It just is and always will be, giving meaning to life and direction to goodness ... Love will never die. — Bryce Courtenay

I knew then that the person on the outside was only a shell, a presence to be seen and provoked. Inside was the real me, where my tears joined the tears of all the sad people to form the three waterfalls in the night country. — Bryce Courtenay

He was notorious for cutting short extraneous verbiage from over-loquacious barristers". — Bryce Courtenay

The only thing that's authentic about what a writer writes is his work. — Bryce Courtenay

It's who you is when folks knocks at the door of your heart what counts. Hide the past and it gives them what's jealous of you the power to bring you undone. — Bryce Courtenay

Advertising seemed almost natural to me because it was a business where you had to inform, persuade and educate. And so from being a junior copywriter to being the creative director of one of the largest advertising agencies in the country took me 4.5 years, which is, well, a fairly spectacular rise. — Bryce Courtenay

I keep saying that backwards is all you can see. You can't see front. My wife says, "Stop, you're always in the past." She sees me sort of daydreaming. — Tom Courtenay

Turning to Ann Gower, she smiled. "You're a good woman, Ann Gower."
Ann Gower drew back and looked askance at Mary. "Don't you go ruinin' me reputation, Mary Abacus. I be a real bad woman, but a bloody good whore, and you knows it! — Bryce Courtenay

Courtenay matter. There must be letters. Many of them appear, as you know, to concern the problems of navigation in which he was interested, but it is not difficult to read behind the lines. He died in Padua, and from what I can learn, all his papers were sealed in a casket and locked up by the Bailiff for safety. Rumour has it that Peter Vannes the English Ambassador has been told to — Dorothy Dunnett

Half of Japan still couldn't tell the difference between crime and politics. — Jon Courtenay Grimwood

The Zenjirli inscriptions supply far more suggestive criteria, and show how cautious we must be in coming to conclusions respecting the unity of the Aramaic language. These inscriptions are in many ways more akin to Hebrew and Assyrian than to Aramaic. — John Courtenay James

There was something intrinsically sad about Shinjuku. A vacuum-packed hollowness that no quantity of neon could hide. Roppongi was the same, only there the sadness was older and more Western. All that movement to so little purpose. A million strangers searching for a cure to the darkness behind their eyes in the void between someone else's legs. — Jon Courtenay Grimwood

All beauty, according to Lady Katchatka, had its origins in pain. — Jon Courtenay Grimwood

My only desire is to teach the word o' man and leave the word o' Gawd to the pulpit men — Bryce Courtenay

What's the point in being an unpopular writer? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. For me it doesn't, anyway. — Bryce Courtenay

First with the head and then with the heart. — Bryce Courtenay

I am essentially an entertainer and a storyteller. — Bryce Courtenay

Pride is holding your head up when everyone around you has theirs bowed. Courage is what makes you do it. — Bryce Courtenay

One thing is certain in life. Just when things are going well, soon afterward they are certain to go wrong. It's just the way things are meant to be. — Bryce Courtenay

As is so often the case with a legend, every incident has two possible interpretations, the plausible and the one that is molded to suit the making of the myth. Man is a romantic at heart and will always put aside dull, plodding reason for the excitement of an enigma. As Doc had pointed out, mystery, not logic, is what gives us hope and keeps us believing in a force greater than our own insignificance. — Bryce Courtenay

The section of Aramaeans that pressed its way from the Euphrates southward, and drove the Edomites out of Petra, was afterwards known as Nabataean. — John Courtenay James

Racism does not diminish with brains, it's a disease, a sickness, it may incubate in ignorance but it doesn't necessarily disappear with the gaining of wisdom! — Bryce Courtenay

I don't want to peak too early. The worry is that you never know until it's all over whether you peaked at all - and then you're finished and it's too late. — Tom Courtenay

You can't go feeding your hate on the past, it's not natural. — Bryce Courtenay

Mix the head with the heart, and you're ahead from the start. — Bryce Courtenay

But I started to realize that it doesn't begin like this, that anybody can be the target for prejudice, all you have to be is "too" something . Too short, too fat, too clever, too big, too small, too slow, too new, "too different" from what others think of as normal. — Bryce Courtenay

Over all this lay Hoppie's dictum: First with the head and then with the heart. Winning was something you worked at intellectually, emotion clouds the mind and is its natural enemy. This made for a loneliness which often let me aching to share an emotion but equally afraid that if I did so I would reveal a weakness which could later be used against me. — Bryce Courtenay

Every man is an island and at the same time also robinson crusoe. — Bryce Courtenay

And if you should be there and you see this beautiful cactus blossom painted silver by the moon and laughing up at the stars, this, Peekay, is heaven. — Bryce Courtenay

A man on the run finds compassion or loveor even pretended innocence his greatest source of danger. — Bryce Courtenay